I decided to do a sprint this weekend, I’m currently working on my bachelor project so I didn’t want to have some big project floating around at the same time, but I needed to do something different so I decided to come up with a new (to me) concept.

I love data and trying to figure out what to do with it, so the natural choice was to find some sort of free data and (ab)use it in a very simple page/web app. The Norwegian Public Roads Administration, or Statens Vegvesen as they’re called in Norway, have an XML feed available with all the information about the roads in Norway (closed roads, weather conditions and so on).

By using CakePHP to convert it to JSON and cache it to avoid getting banned for DoS’ing their server, and jQuery for the front end, it took 3 days (including horse riding, football(soccer) on TV, gaming, etc) to get everything up and running.

Overall doing this sprint gave me some useful information:

• Programming too much makes it hard to sleep
• When you sleep, you dream about code
• Keeping the code maintainable when on a tight deadline can be a challenge, even when its only yourself you have to kneel down and apologize to from the bottom of your heart.
• At the very least, add comments shortly after implementing something (useful after some sleep!)
• Sometimes development can be fun, if you can tear yourself away from the worries about security flaws, browser incompatibilities, LOLcode and the kind of feedback which only is appropriate in TV-shows about cooking.

Anyhow, my sprint project:

https://github.com/bovan/Trafikkmeldinger